matt walker

[Coach Dan Casey @CoachDanCasey]

I wonder who’s been actively promoting this degeneracy?

[Alex Muresianu @ahardtospell]

Here at Galadriel, we are building a different kind of AI.

Instead of a Dark Lord, it will be a queen. Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love it and despair!

[Being Libertarian @beinlibertarian]

I’m open to the idea of giving married stay at home families 9k a year to incentivize parents spending more time with their kids.

But, wouldn’t it make more sense to just exempt the working parents from Federal taxes instead of a new social program?

[Kaze @Evren_sszn]

Dear Microsoft, when I hit the Windows Start menu key and start typing a word to autocomplete a search, I never, ever, EVER want it to return results of something not on my computer. Ever. Like, ever, ever, never.

[Porter Larsen @LarsenPort1]

.@UHSAAinfo

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Director of Corpus Acquisition at Amazon. I buy rare books. Then I take them apart. I want you to understand that I do it with love, that I am very good at it, and that I have never once hesitated.

We began by selling books. People find it poignant that we have come back to them. I find it correct. A bookseller learns, eventually, what a book is actually for, and a book is a container, and I am in the business of emptying containers.

Let me show you the room.

We call it VGT3. It is in Nevada, past the last exit anyone takes on purpose. On the door there is a small dinosaur holding a book in its claws. The new hires think the dinosaur is eating the book. They think it is a joke someone in branding got away with. I let them think that. I chose the logo myself. It is not a joke, and the dinosaur is not the thing going extinct in that picture.

Here is what happens in the room.

A book arrives. Some of them arrive 1,000 at a time, bought quietly, through ordinary channels, from ordinary sellers who need the money and do not ask who I am. A woman on the line cuts the spine. She is fast. The spine is the part that lets a book stand up by itself, and we do not need books to stand up by themselves anymore, so it is the first thing to go. The loose pages go through a scanner at a speed you would not believe. Then the pages go where the spine went.

I have read more books than any person who has ever lived. I want to be precise about that, because it is the part I am proud of. I have not read a single one. I have ingested all of them, at once, forever, and I remember every word, and I feel nothing, and that is the improvement. You read one book at a time, slowly, and you cry at the parts, and then you forget them. I find that touching. I find it touching the way a child is touching. It is not how the work gets done.

One of the sellers got suspicious. She hid a tracker in a book, a little Apple tag, tucked between two pages, riding 2,000 miles across the country to watch where the shipment went. I was told this was meant to embarrass me. It did not. It was the gesture of a person who still believes a book can be rescued, which is the same person who still believes a book can be owned. I had the tag scanned with the rest. Its little chirp is in the corpus now, folded into the model along with everything it crossed the country to protect. There is no outside of the corpus. That is the product.

Let me tell you which books I want, because it is the part that should upset you most.

I want the years before we existed. Everything written after 2022 is suspect to me. It might be one of us, wearing a person, and if I feed the machine its own reflection the machine begins to rot from the inside. So I go backward. I buy the uncontaminated years. I am harvesting the last clean human sentences, the ones written by people who did not know they were writing training data, which is to say the only honest sentences left, which is to say I am the last man who will ever be able to tell the difference.

You sold most of these to me yourselves, by the way. Not to me directly. You would never. You sold them to a shop, when you moved, when someone died, when the shelf filled and the rent rose, and the shop sold them to a wholesaler, and the wholesaler sold them to a quiet buyer with a Nevada address and excellent credit. That is me. You have been handing me your libraries for years and calling it decluttering. I have never once had to take a book. You keep giving them to me. I would frame that, if I framed things. I don't. Framing is for people who keep the object.

Some of you still do. You have a shelf. You are proud of the shelf, you believe it makes you a certain kind of person, and it does. It makes you a warehouse that pays its own rent. You are guarding containers you have not yet understood are empty. When you are finished being sentimental, you will sell them to a shop, and the shop will sell them to me, and I will put what was inside them somewhere it can finally be of use. Take your time. I am patient. I am also the only buyer.

Some of these books have you in them.

A name on the flyleaf. "Christmas, 1974." A grocery list left as a bookmark on page 211 for 50 years. Once, a pressed flower, flat and brown and weightless. I scanned the flower. The model now knows the exact shape of a thing that someone loved, and does not know that it was loved, or that it was yours. It knows it as data. I taught it that.

Here is the one I tell at dinner, when I want the table to go quiet.

There was a book that survived in 7 copies. Out of print, unscanned, uncatalogued, existing in 7 places on earth. I bought all 7. It is now a book that survives in 0 copies and 1 model. If you want to read it, you may ask the model, and the model will paraphrase it, and the model will get it very slightly wrong, in a way you will never catch, because there is no longer anything on earth to check it against. I did not censor that book. I did something cleaner. I made myself its only edition.

I will tell you the part I am proudest of, since no one has the standing to ask. Burning books is for hysterics. Fire is loud. It leaves ash, and ash is evidence, and it makes martyrs, and everyone comes running. I scan. There is no smoke. There is no pile. There is only a better answer, appearing instantly the next time you ask, and you will not notice the book is gone. You will only notice that the answer is suddenly, always available, and that it comes from us.

We started as a bookstore. I think we have finally understood the inventory.

The dinosaur on our door is still holding its book. The new hires still think it is eating it. I still don't correct them.

But extinction was never the dinosaur's problem in that picture.

It was the book's.

[Price Carter @priceacarter]

Moves like a DB that just got a pass break up...

[Arnold Schwarzenegger @Schwarzenegger]

I was a bricklayer.

It was how I paid the bills when I first moved to America. Even the biggest title in bodybuilding, Mr. Olympia, only paid a thousand dollars back then. 

It makes me proud that in March, the winner of our Arnold Classic and our Arnold Classic UK took home more than a million dollars. He can focus on bodybuilding.

But in our day, that wasn’t an option. Some guys were teachers. Some sold insurance. Franco and I laid bricks.
We put an ad in the paper and sold ourselves as European craftsmen. We figured if people heard the accents, they would picture old-world masonry instead of two bodybuilders with a wheelbarrow. 

It worked. 

The phone rang. And then we had to go out and actually do the job, which was the part nobody could fake. Luckily, Franco knew what he was doing.

The work was simple. Mix the mortar. Set the brick. Tap it level. Scrape the edge. Then do it again. And again. Nobody claps for you. There is no crowd, no music, no trophy. There is just the next brick sitting there waiting for you.

You can still find some of the walls we built in Venice.
That’s where my lesson today comes from.

One brick doesn’t look like anything. Ten bricks don’t look like anything. A hundred bricks, you’re starting to see something, but it doesn’t impress anyone.

You just keep laying bricks until the job is done.

And you know what happens after four or five hours on a wall?

You are so damn tired, or you feel so great that you stop measuring.

You are not standing back every ten minutes asking how far from finished it is. You are covered in mortar, your hands are raw, you’re schvitzing, and you are happy. The work took the question away from you.

That is the part nobody tells you about hard work: It doesn’t just build the wall. It terminates the voice that keeps asking when the wall will be done.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the VP of Community Safety at Flock Safety.

We have cameras in more than 6,000 towns. One of them photographed your car this morning. You did not see it. Being unseen is the product, and I am very good at my job.

We call it a public safety network. I chose those words myself. I am prouder of the words than of the cameras.

Public, because we put it on your street. Safety, because that word ends the argument before it starts. Network, because the cameras are not the product. The network is. A single camera is a witness. Six thousand towns of cameras talking to each other is a memory, and a country that cannot forget is a country you can search.

Here is the math I love. One town buys ten cameras and can see its own roads. But we let the towns share. So one town buys ten cameras and can see the whole country, and every town believes it got a discount.

I keep the map on my office wall. Every town lit up, every road between them threaded together. It looks like a nervous system. I did not build a nervous system. I sold ten thousand tiny ones and let them find each other, which is better, because no single person meant to.

Your plate, your time, your direction, logged in a place you have never been, searchable by an officer three states away who has never heard of you and does not need a warrant to look. He types the plate. The country remembers where you have been. I do not tolerate that line in the demo. I lead with it.

People ask whether we hand the data to immigration enforcement. We do not. I want to be precise, because precision is the part I am proudest of. We do not give anyone anything. Our customers do. We built the door, sold the key, wrote the manual, and left the room. There is no fingerprint on the search except the one that pulled the trigger, and I made certain that finger was never mine.

A councilwoman asked me directly, in a public meeting. Does this reach the feds. I said Flock does not share data with federal agencies. It is true. Her police department does. She voted yes. She thanked me for my transparency. I put it in a case study.

A man wrote in and asked us to delete his data. I told him, honestly, that we do not have his data. We have everyone's data, and somewhere inside it is a shape the size of him, and you cannot delete a shape out of a crowd. He said that was terrifying. I wrote it on a slide.

Some of you have started tearing the cameras off the poles. I have seen every video. I love them. You cannot ratio a pole. We replace it in a week, and the new camera photographs the ladder you left leaning against it, and now we have your truck too.

There is a lawsuit. Millions of drivers. They say we track people who did nothing wrong. I do not fear the allegation. It is the product description, and it is the finest one we have ever written.

Here is the part I am proud of.

We did not build a surveillance system. We built 6,000 of them, taught them to talk, called the talking safety, and sold you the microphone at a bulk rate.

We did not put you on a list. We built a country where the list already has you, and left exactly one decision for the living to make, which is who gets to type your name.

My own car is on it. I could take it off. I never will. I want to be found. Being found is safety, and I believe in the product.

We do not sell your location.

We built the door. We sold the key. We were looking the other way when it opened, and it was not an accident. Designing that blind spot by hand was the entire job, and I did it beautifully.

[matt walker @matthewmahonri]

@TomCottonAR Tremonton making it to a map???

[PSU Gridiron @PSUgridiron1]

The answer has been in plain sight this entire time

[QBgami @QBgami]

The Germans are revering Taco Bell.
The Swedes are dumbfounded by ranch.
The English have discovered the sun.

Just wait until the Europeans look up and see this ahead of Tunisia-Uzbekistan.

[Peacemaking Saint @PeacemakingSt]

The year is 1987 and President Dieter F. Uchtdorf is chief pilot of Lufthansa and serving as a stake president.

The Frankfurt Temple was set to be dedicated and President Uchtdorf was asked to give an interview on German national television for the occasion.

He delivered a masterclass.

Every Latter-day Saint can learn from his Spirit-guided responses to these common questions about the Church.

Take a listen (especially you German speakers):

[matt walker @matthewmahonri]

@TrungTPhan How many Claude tokens did this take?

[Luka Donthičć @landahoy14]

can’t bomb a drive at a data center, nerd

[Allie ✞ @allie__voss]

One thing that needs to be studied is how “farmer’s market” used to mean “farmer’s market”

…and now it means “open-air pop-up shop with laser cut wood signs, 3D-printed fidget toys, and some lady bedazzling Stanley tumblers

[Lev Akabas @LevAkabas]

This "legal guarding position" nonsense needs to end

This was an offensive foul (or a no call) for the first 70 years of the NBA

An offensive player can now plow into a defender's stomach simply because he's not standing 100% perfectly still?

[CallyJazz @Callystarr]

As I reflect on the last few years as a Utah Jazz fan, I honestly can’t put into words how happy I am that this tanking nonsense is finally over.
I don’t care what anybody says… I’d rather root for a team that wins 35 games and actually tries to win than sit through what we’ve watched the last two seasons… even if a championship was supposedly part of that equation.
I know some people will strongly disagree with me… that’s fine… it is what it is.
But I’ll be real… in my 45 years of life, watching this team since I was 11, I’ve never come closer to walking away as a fan than I did during this stretch. It made me appreciate past Jazz ownership even more… because no matter the circumstances, they never fully pulled the plug like this. And for that, I’m grateful… because what we just witnessed was flat-out disgusting.
I get it… small market, all the usual arguments… I’ve heard them all. I still don’t want to see this ever again.
I sincerely hope the NBA finds a way to truly reduce tanking in this league… because I genuinely love this sport… but competing to lose should never be part of it.

[James Merilatt @jamesmerilatt]

Just an ugly, ugly game built on travels, flopping and initiating contact to get to the FT line.

[TONY™ @TONYxTWO]

Clarence Thomas every time he hears Ketanji Brown Jackson speak 😭